Quicksand's 'Bring On The Psychics' Is a Riff-Monster Return Worth the Five-Year Wait
Quicksand’s first album in five years opens with “Get To It” detonating out of the gate, and the band — Walter Schreifels on guitar and vocals, Sergio Vega on bass, Alan Cage on drums — never really lets you catch your breath across the ten tracks that follow. Produced by Jon Markson (Drug Church, Drain), Bring On The Psychics fuses the intensity of the band’s ’90s run with the atmospheric widescreen sound of their recent output, and Stereogum tapped it as Album of the Week for good reason.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Vega’s bass is instantly recognizable here — thick, melodic, and mixed high enough to function as a second lead voice against Schreifels’ guitar, exactly the way it did on the band’s heaviest early work.
The Spatial Dynamics: Markson lets vast, reverb-soaked soundscapes collide with raw, in-the-red intensity — “Days You Run To” stretches out to 5:36 of hazy, understated daydream before the record snaps back to the chugging riff-monster mode of “Agency” and “Cool Guy.”
Standout Performance
Schreifels’ vocal and guitar work is described as breathtakingly passionate throughout, but the whole trio operates as one unit — nowhere more than on “Crystallize,” a hook-laden three minutes that Treble singled out as some of the tightest post-punk songwriting the band has ever recorded.
Why It’s Certified
At 29 minutes, nothing here overstays its welcome, and the record’s real trick is thematic: these are songs about aging and the inevitability of change that never once sound tired. The title track’s quiet-loud buildup is the mission statement in miniature — impatience and resignation, riffing against each other until they resolve. Twenty-nine minutes, zero filler, one of the year’s best post-hardcore records. Certified great.